103 CHAPTER 3 MULTIPLE VOICES OF WOMAN IN SARAH PIATT'S POEMS Among women writers of the 19 th century American literature Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt was also one who has also contributed to the writing of women. From much impressing themes, this chapter elaborates the very personality of a woman of the 19th century conventional era. The multiple of voices of women in transition of roles as a beloved, a wife and a mother represented by Sarah Piatt’s poems are discussed. By Sarah Piatt, immense poems were written at different stages of women. It is studied and understood that she was under the influence of contemporary social issues, including the nature and role of women in all aspects. Sarah Piatt is given the ‘light of perfection’ to give good reason for the roles of her, as a woman and as a writer all the more. Sarah Piatt ventured into modern poems by introducing resisting voices of women in her poems, establishing genteel values and turning them into a vehicle by which she could explore the artistic and moral limitations of her society. This study substantiates the concept of marginalization of woman from the main stream of known and famous American writers, with the reasons with ‘if not she, then who would’ and with a sense of admiration for her social and thematic inclusions. In order to voice the women’s aspirations and emotions Sarah Piatt has chosen the role of a speaker as a beloved, wife and a mother. Throughout her poems, many relevant ample evidences are displayed which are considered as the design to decorate the very view or the quality of the pattern of her state in three important roles of a woman. It is observed that whenever the society speaks about a woman or about the woman’s society as a whole, ‘Motherhood’ stands with ‘A’ priority among all the
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103
CHAPTER 3
MULTIPLE VOICES OF WOMAN IN SARAH PIATT'S POEMS
Among women writers of the 19th century American literature Sarah Morgan
Bryan Piatt was also one who has also contributed to the writing of women. From
much impressing themes, this chapter elaborates the very personality of a woman of
the 19th century conventional era. The multiple of voices of women in transition of
roles as a beloved, a wife and a mother represented by Sarah Piatt’s poems are
discussed.
By Sarah Piatt, immense poems were written at different stages of women. It
is studied and understood that she was under the influence of contemporary social
issues, including the nature and role of women in all aspects. Sarah Piatt is given the
‘light of perfection’ to give good reason for the roles of her, as a woman and as a
writer all the more. Sarah Piatt ventured into modern poems by introducing resisting
voices of women in her poems, establishing genteel values and turning them into a
vehicle by which she could explore the artistic and moral limitations of her society.
This study substantiates the concept of marginalization of woman from the main
stream of known and famous American writers, with the reasons with ‘if not she, then
who would’ and with a sense of admiration for her social and thematic inclusions.
In order to voice the women’s aspirations and emotions Sarah Piatt has chosen
the role of a speaker as a beloved, wife and a mother. Throughout her poems, many
relevant ample evidences are displayed which are considered as the design to decorate
the very view or the quality of the pattern of her state in three important roles of a
woman. It is observed that whenever the society speaks about a woman or about the
woman’s society as a whole, ‘Motherhood’ stands with ‘A’ priority among all the
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other qualities. Because, the ‘motherhood’ with its best qualities which would rather
bring additional aspects of a woman of ‘being a mother.’ Usually motherhood
establishes the nature of ‘mothering’ to her children and combines the household
activities or the responsibilities.
In recent years of the novelty in twenty first century, the term ‘responsibility’
is exchanged with the meaning of / as ‘working’ and thereby the construction of
voices for the working for family-hood is criticized with ‘adjectives of qualities of
‘feminism.’ Yet, amidst the core of the problematic situations under the regime of
Queen Victoria, and the Victorian sensibilities, the perspectives of social attitudes and
activities are observed in Sarah Piatt’s conventionally ‘fit’ poems. This controlled her
‘stock-exchanging’ voices of her gender. On the whole she did not criticize against
male-subjugation and woman’s ‘erring’. She neutralized the standard of both the
social genders and instructed her opposite sex with some strong and actively lessoning
phrases to make them realize the nature of subjugation of woman. She has criticized
with an adequate amount of rights from her own state of being woman in a Victorian
standard, for the cause of imbalanced society due to the lack and negligence of
responsibility of women society for the better and morally strong lineage of her New
Land (America).
In the hierarchical status the confrontation among the roles of Sarah as
beloved, wife and mother, motherhood persists to claim the topmost level of a woman
and it is the source of transition or the evolution of stages. Sarah Piatt’s expression of
the conventional role of motherhood could no way be related to feministic exposures
of recent decades.
In American history ‘‘the woman movement’ awakened in the 1840s was in
the context of abolition of slavery by giving voice against the slavery and against the
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denial of voting rights to the white women” (Susan E. Chase & Mary F. Rogers 4-5).
From the motherhood’s responsibilities like, educating, disciplining, protecting,
sacrificing, comforting, supporting, organizing, doing domestic duties, and attending
to the details of children’s life, womanhood found a different path like a militant,
vigilant, involving in personal and political beliefs and actions, sometimes a strong
and forceful and self-assured of doing anything. These characteristics of
disproportionate from the real ideologies of conventional motherhood changed their
habits and habitual actions too. Margaret Watters mentioned that,
“In 1848, Elizabeth Cady and Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized a women’s
convention in Seneca Falls, New York, USA, since they were denied along with other
women to attend the world convention on slavery, which was attended by Americans
in London. As a pro-world convention, they two organized this and it was successful”
(33).
They campaigned for rights, including the vote, for woman and for the African
Americans. While coming to writing of nineteenth century women of France, Sonya
Stephens has an opinion that “the social changes that mark the nineteenth century and
led to the increasing dominance of the bourgeoisie and the growing literary and
leverage of the working classes that inevitably affected the position of women.
Moreover, the increasing power of the press, the proliferation of newspapers and
periodicals had been introduced in the 1830s. And, the surge in the members of
printed books and pamphlets gave women a much broader audience and a much wider
array of venues through which their views were made known” (Sonya Stephens 122).
So, it is eventually learnt that, the literature of France is very much forwarded
comparing to other literature in which women are part of it, and has depicted
women’s writing and views through journals and other print media. Rather, in
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American literature, it is less and except Emily Dickinson no other woman writer has
attained popularity among other women writers of 19th century.
In Sarah Piatt’s poems, there were no such signs and references to women’s
suffrage movement which was the very basis for the feminist ideologies of the later
part of 19th century American Women Movement, and its continuation. She had been
in and out of a voyage in her thought and expression freely. Firstly, the psychic
distress due to the loss of her children at their childhood age caused much pain.
Secondly, she was in depression caused by travel and staying with her husband due to
changes in the course of his work. As a conventional, normal wife she meted out the
happenings of social interventions by responding to it. Thirdly, since there was no
mentioning of Sarah Piatt’s working status, she might have probably been free and in
isolation too in the absence of her husband. Losing her three children at a continual
gap had pushed her tendency to be focused simply on the sociological and
psychological approach to get writing as the archetypal images of ‘motherhood’,
beloved’ and ‘wife’ which are the three transitions of a normal, conventional
Victorian woman of her era. Her conventional roles of being a woman had not
restricted from her usual doings.
In this chapter, the study is based on Sarah Piatt’s treatment of transition from
one stage to another, from each important role of a woman; such as, beloved, wife and
mother / motherhood. As part of recovering the last voices of nineteenth century
women writers’ role in making of an American sense, Sarah Piatt’s careful and
courageous portrayal of the contemporary conventional era is also unveiled. This
study on Motherhood, wife and beloved could serve as a tool to enrich in bringing out
the role of her writing despite the ‘silenced-voice’ due to reasons like politics, ethnic
and gender issues of 19th century America.
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It is to be ascertained whether only the male writers touched and emphasized
the universal themes or the women writers were simply unconcerned about the social
issues like nationalism, war, civil war, slavery and other relevant sufferings of the 19th
century common people. Despite the powerful reasons to keep away Sarah Piatt and
be hidden for a long time, in the array of most notable 19th century American
Literature, now she is being given a unique, notable and a significant place along with
19th century social writers. She has claimed this place by her realistic approach and
interventions to bring out the issues with aesthetically rich and conventionally never
over bound.
In the introductory part of “The Palace Burner”, P.B. Bennett declared that,
‘because of the extraordinary circumstances of her life, and the long span of time over
which her poems appeared, Sarah Piatt was able to reflect in her poetry the principal
social, national and artistic concerns of over fifty years of American women’s poetry’
(2001, xxvii). Among the most notable stages of Sarah Piatt’s career as a poetess,
being a mother was considered as most gifted one. Also, the motherhood had served
much to her weariness’ exposure in her writing for which she had used to write habit
as an out-let to most of her feelings. Sarah Piatt’s first and only daughter among other
six children was born in 1862 and thereby her motherhood began. Later in 1864, she
had stayed with her husband John James Piatt, in a country house of Georgetown
Heights, outside of Washington town.
During her stay in Georgetown Heights, Sarah Piatt had given birth to her first
son Victor in 1864. During the heady years, it is learnt that Sarah Piatt had obtained
impression from the acquaintances of her husband and other well-known writers like
his contemporaries namely Howells, James Russell Lowell, the editor of the Atlantic,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William D.O’ Connor, Walt Whitman, E.C. Stedman,
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and Richard H. Stoddard. As the indirect impression of famous writing of the authors,
including her husband’s, with an amalgamation of motherhood her career in writing
was enriched. From the writing of Sarah Piatt it is noted that she was entirely different
and distinguished from other female writers and their subjects of writing. She had
been the epitome of her contemporary social events’ exact projection through her
writing. That was the reason why Sarah Piatt’s critics could not align her writing with
feminists or feminism oriented themes.
Principally saying, she was more than her feminine disclosures. She was a
social realist through her portrayal of universal themes. She was not rather like a frog
in the well to watch the place and to speak about only its four walls’ echoes. She had
been an extended thinker in the sea of social events developing in America, and had
voyaged in analyzing the social events from the crux of the events’ outburst as
denoted and predicted in her well known pieces of writing like “The Palace Burner,”
“Beatrice Cenci” etc. In both the poems, the mother-child paradigm was vitally played
as an archetypal image to predict social events as an instructive means. The mode of
expression eventually may also be seen as an invocation to draw the attention of
future daughters with her instructions.
This discussion centers primarily on Sarah Piatt’s experiences of marriage and
motherhood with ample examples and expressions depicted in her poems. The poem,
“Her Snowdrops” is written in the third person narration on motherhood, which
reveals an instruction to love or prediction of love and fondness of a mother towards
her child. The setting of this poem is a lovely home with a fireplace inside. The
beginning of the poem sets the situation of a winter evening, and before the sleeping
hours. The mother had a strong and unshakable faith in the immortality of the soul
and its beauty. The narrator of the poem expressed the view on the beauty of the
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listener / reader as comparatively less beautiful than the child’s beauty. That could be
the sufficient means in accepting the density on the keen portrayal of the beauty of a
child while the listener would be a little more mature than that of child’s. The speaker
of the poem would show the identity of a loving and caring mother figure on its tone
and density in beautifying the fairness of a child with the comparative sense as
expressed in the following lines;
The woman who sits in the firelight here,
Kissing her child to its lovely sleep,
Has the faith of a soul more tender and clear,
In its higher beauty, than yours, to keep. (PB Bennett 17).
As the imaginary line was around the middle of the Earth at an equal distance from
the North Pole and the South, the shadowy dreams were united by a chain of Gold,
made radiant wings (parts) in the palms (of the child). And the rustling sound echoes
around her presence as a sad undertone;
Sometimes she is sad at a rustling sound –
Like radiant wings in the palms, it seems;
She can feel the shining Equator wound,
Like a chain of gold, through her shadowy dreams. (17)
The comparative, metaphoric representations like, ‘chain of gold’, with ‘shadowy
dreams’ , ‘wings in the palms’ with ‘shining Equator (unseen)’ diminish the visibility
and moving beyond the three unities i.e., time, place, and action as found in the plays.
Because, the poem was begun with reference to the winter season (“the woman who
sits in the firelight here”) and in the fifth stanza bearing reference to ‘spring’ (wood)
moving in ‘time’ of the season, The beauty of the poem lies in the making of stanza
division. Because, when the first or the previous stanza seems to be the words of the
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mother and the following would be the reference to the beauty / beautifying words of
the child and the final stanza recalls the bygone days of the past and the beauty of
adoring the lost love of her beloved lover:-
And sometimes yet, from the dewy air,
Of that blossoming morning of long ago,
He puts these cold, white buds in her hair,
And says: ‘They will melt in its sunny glow; (17)
This poem could serve the quest of Sarah’s multi-dimensional personalities’
projection, such as, the love of mother, child’s beauty, fictional aestheticism,
conventional religious dogmas, dramatic realism and other aspects with elite
employment of metaphor and similes in much. Sarah Piatt’s two dimensional roles or
the dual role is seen in ‘The Funeral of a Doll’. She has shown evidences of
perfection for understanding the motherhood. And, love from her exact predictions of
both the child for the loss of a doll (‘blue-eyed and sweet; she always smiled’) and of
a mother who grieved for losing the happiness over the death of doll (a child of Sarah
herself) are expressed. As a little girl grieved over the death / loss of a doll, this
motherly speaker has also shaken the hearts by her complete expression of her
personal disposition for the loss of a child. It was almost like a ‘cold’ and pitiable
conversation between a mother and her child.
The uses of phrases like ‘Little Nell’ and ‘blue-eyed’ are used with some
special emphasis rather than to be for their actual and lexical meaning. While, coming
to examine the literal connectivity to the phrases, Bennett has included that the
reference of ‘Little Nell’, as the highly sentimentalized heroine of Charles’ Dickens
‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ (1841) (PB Bennett 166). The ‘blue-eyed’ reference brings
the meaning for its usage of metaphor since it needs the attention of all the eyes for its
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reference. The phrase ‘blue-eyed’, literally brings meaning as ‘the attention seeking’
one. The ‘Blue-eyed’ means, that one would be better than anyone else and who
would therefore receive better treatment than others. When going into the subject, a
child could speak by counting or collecting words to express his/her needs for the
requirements to be governed. It would rarely be possible for a child to express such a
huge phrase like ‘It was a funeral, mamma. Oh, Poor Little Nell is dead, is dead’ (32).
Rather, that could be possible to the speaker (Sarah herself) to speak on as being
alternately in the place of a child who grieves childishly for the loss of a child, the
doll, to mamma. The recollection of past activities of the child, made her grieve for
that moment with the dense feeling of loss:
How dark! --- and do you hear it blow?
She is afraid. “And, as she said
These sobbing words, she laid her head
Between her hands and whispered: “Here
Her bed is made, the precious dear
She cannot sleep in it. I knew
And there is no one left to wear
Her pretty clothes. Where did she go?
See, this poor ribbon tied her hair! (SMB Piatt 107)
The female child left the mother homesick, by leaving her pretty clothes, and ribbon
to be worn by another female child. It might have some semi-autobiographical note,
because, to the speaker (if Sarah Piatt) of this poem, she was blessed with only one
female child among the other six male children. To be very specific, it was Sarah’s
first and only daughter, namely Marian, who was born in 1862 (xxv) and whom she
lost. As, every poet has his or her own poetic license to conduct an experiment in a
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variety of forms to project aesthetic beauty and achievement in fulfilling the meaning
of writing, Sarah’s selection of form with four stanzas consists of eleven lines in each;
and, finds its own merit in form and content to articulate the mood of the poems in
line with the mothering and its bondage with grief and contentment of the child.
Poems of Sarah Piatt, especially on or about children, would normally begin as
conversations between the mother and the child, or with her usual style of using
Poly-voices. Most of Sarah’s poems were used to project the nineteenth century
bourgeois’ emotion. In this array, the poems written as being a mother, for expressing
the motherhood were more outstanding than the other writers.
The suffering of women like losing children, and husbands as well would lead
them to become bait for financial consequences, which would sometimes induce them
losing their conventional life at the cost of poverty (P.B. Bennett, 2003 6). As a Social
Realist, Sarah Piatt’s each verse on events turned as a mirror on the social matters
specifically domestic affairs during the contemporary period. This is portrayed
through the events like in company with children at home, walking on the street,
roadside pavement, garden etc., Sarah Piatt has dealt with some of the 19th century
social happenings. Children’s activities, and indeed are the media to communicate for
what she would like to express to the readers and, society through her poems. In many
of her poems, the style, like use of poly-voices could have been a component for
expressing the events at her maximum risk. Despite the reason of ‘finding very
difficult’ to bring the exact meaning out of her poems in relation to social events, her
poems instill interest and paved way for the accomplishment of intellectual quest.
Among numerous poems written on motherhood, the poem entitled ‘My Babes in The
Wood’ (S. M. B. Piatt 1894 127), has sought the attention for its different setting.
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At the primary level of teaching, children would be given text books of stories
with painted pictures of related characters to make it comprehensible. One such event
is considered for a comparative view in Sarah Piatt’s poems “My Babes in the Wood”
(H41: 246:825 Nov. 1870, Harper’s Monthly Magazine)}. By drawing the attention
for learning such events better than what one could get it from old stories, Sarah Piatt
has proven her artistic intelligence from her enthusiastic beginning as;
I know a story, fairer, dimmer, sadder,
Than any story painted in your books
You are so glad? It will not make you gladder,
Yet listen, with your pretty restless looks. (SMB Piatt 127)
Mary Wearn denotes that,
Until the fag end of the twentieth century, Sarah Piatt was not much read as a
writer of the American Poetry. And, it was the event of the non-American
readers too. Sarah Piatt seems to be not given much importance to her writing
on some ground reasons and issues like, gender, theme, social background of
the dominating West-American writers etc. She was considered as very
‘feminine’ in her writing, whose works reflected the ‘joy, grief, and
aspirations of the ordinary woman’s life, with the consciously relied Victorian
sensibility (2006 75).
But, it was studied in later stage that, more than a common woman of Victorian
sensibility of 19th century’s conventional roles, Sarah Piatt had also projected the
social events dealing with the rebellious nature of woman against social injustices.
This was clearly evident in her poems like ‘The Palace Burner’ and ‘Beatrice Cenci’.
Piatt had given reasons from contemporary social events and from the past too having
a cross reference of examples in time.
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Especially, in ‘The Palace Burner’ the beauty of the poem lies in the
conversation between mother and child talking about the social events written in
question and answer style and a lesson from the study of the past. Sarah Piatt had
played a compatible role than a normal mother. Despite some critics’ view about her
poems, she was domestic by serving her family by nurturing the children, providing
them morally right things and being loyal to her husband. She was pious for the
dogmas of her paternal religion. There were some hindrances like social changes;
unexpected events took place in her married life, and also subsequent changes in
working places of her husband. These dominantly affected her psychological
exposure in most of her poems by having a pendulum like swaying thoughts between
the faith and fact. This influenced her to be discouraged and question faith and god.
While writing about motherhood, P.B. Bennett had mentioned in her Preface
to ‘The Palace Burner’ that "Sarah Piatt had written much provocatively on the
subjects of motherhood and children, more and better than any other contemporary
writers of the 19th century could do" (2001, xviv). There could be reasons of social
happening in America to transit Sarah’s original nature of being conservative and a
sentimental Victorian woman, for selecting the themes of ‘The Palace Burner’ and
‘Beatrice Cenci’, bravely. The force and power with which she dealt this could be
discovered from these poems. In ‘Beatrice Cenci’ the poet allowed the speaker of the
poem with a murderous touch to justify the murder of her (Beatrice Cenci’s) own
father. The father had imprisoned Cenci's mother and brother due to his crooked mind
because he liked to maintain his illegal courtship with another woman (71).
The importance of correlating and cross referencing phases of her writing with
dramatic form has shed much light on the study to understand the aim in projecting
such themes, convincing the society and adorned with fair touches and lovely
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expressions of fondness and love of children (of Sarah Piatt). It had also enriched the
ambition and duty of a mother and it enhanced the difference in perspectives and
introduced a worth of Sarah Piatt among the common and gender based writers of her
own era. Principally, for a critical perseverance, Sarah Piatt seemed to be juxtaposed
for using ‘child’ phrases in writing to take effort and succeed in her attempts to
project a ‘mother – children’ conversation. It was more than a common, personal
motherly expression rather as a Universal mother to all the children socially. These
were highly philosophical and much matured than one could expect and imagine
about a child’s exposure. She attempted to project the emotions through the questions
of children. It is evident in the following stanzas from both ‘The Palace Burner’ and
‘Beatrice Cenci.’ Lines from ‘The Palace Burner’ the following two stanzas could
reveal child’s voice;
Has she a charm so calm that is could breathe
In damp, low places till some frightened hour;
Then start, like a fair, subtle snake, and wreathe
A stinging poison with a shadow power?
Would I burn places? The child has seen
In this fierce creature of the Commune here
So bright with bitterness and so serene,
A being finer than my soul, I fear (SMB Piatt 121-22)
And, in ‘Beatrice Cenci’ the stanza goes as:-
Hush! For a child’s quick murmur breaks the charm
Of terror that was winding round me so;
And, at the white touch of her pretty, arm,
Darkness and Death and Agony crouch low
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The natural behavior of a mother to make the child be quiet at the time of seriousness
shows the situation odd to the child. Yet,
The child’s mature question flows here as;
“In old-time dungeons: “Tell me, (is it harm
To ask you?) is the picture real, though?-
And why the beautiful ladies, all, you know,
Live so far off, and die so long ago? (72)
Sarah Piatt was oriented with an expression of close intimation with emotional
bondage with domestic gothic. P.B Bennett related her view of the domestic Gothic
with the expression of Sarah Piatt’s personal identification (2003 11). The Guido
Reni’s famous portrait of Beatrice Cenci was found in a shop window. A question
was raised by the child. Thereby she continued her portrayal of domestic events. The
portrayal of family events took public view when coming to social-eyes of
contemporary social-gothic and horror as found in the case of ‘Beatrice Cenci’;
Is it some Actress?” a slight school-boy said.
Some Actress? Yes.
------ The curtain rolled away,
Dusty and dim. The scene – among the dead---
In some weird, gloomy-pillared palace lay;
The Tragedy, which we have brokenly read,
With its two hundred ghastly years was grey:
None dared applaud with flowers her shadowy way—
Yet, ah! How bitterly well she seemed to play! (1984,72)
It is discussed that the dramatic setting of this poem which enriches the subject matter
and its way out through dialogue between mother and her child. And the speaker’s
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child’s (the school girl / boy’s) sudden murmuring brought the speaker’s
consciousness to the reality. Before that, the child questions that made her to be in a
state of recalling the domestic gothic and horror of Beatrice Cenci, who had murdered
her father with the help of her brother and with her close-inmate, possibly her lover.
The recalled situation might give clues to the state of mind of the speaker from the
following;
Hush! For a Child’s murmur breaks the charm
Of terror that was winding round me so;
And, at the white touch of her pretty arm,
Darkness and Death and Agony crouch low (72).
Somehow it seems impossible to keep Sarah Piatt’s motherhood poems only as an
expression of the motherly love utmost. She plays both as the mother of
consciousness over the social happenings and for its moral predictions out of social-
horror and gothic incidents of both in society and at home. As a teacher teaches
disciples about the moral and how a moralistic approach could be imported on such
events to know the exact truth and the source of the events’ horrors it could be visibly
known from her pictorial portrayal of images of Sarah Piatt’s speakers (mother’s,
possibly Sarah Piatt herself). That shows that, mothers have been the responsible
figures of motherhood and the motherly instructors of social events to her children.
Any loss of dearly reared children would bring a mother to be utterly shattered
and be broken hearted. ‘We Two’ opens the gates of emotional outburst to feel the
deeply rooted pain of heart in its last room. Everyone, including the story could be
changed by Sarah’s speaker and mother. This poem also shows the strong furies
against God’s will which failed to prevent from her agony of losing her two children.
In many of her poems Sarah used religious allusion to expose her inherent, deeply
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rooted feeling of sadness at most. The other side of God’s will from the pleasant and
gracious mood has been given in this poem, and it is compared against the broken
heart due to the death of her two children.
As Bennett (2003), revealed about Sarah’s complaint, “Piatt came closer to
Dickinsonian apostasy in this poem, complaining at the top of her lungs against a
universe arranged for the narcissistic self-aggrandizement (which means ‘the act or
practice of enhancing or exaggerating one's own importance, power, or reputation’) of
an uncaring god.” The opening of the poem leads to show the two different sides of
God:
God’s will is—the bud of rose for your hair,
The ring for your hand and the pearly for your
God’s will is – the mirror that makes you look fair
No wonder you whisper: ‘God’s will is the best. (88-89).
After giving usual qualities to Godliness with the phrases like ‘Bud of the rose to
hear”/ ‘ring to hand’/ ‘Pearly to breast’/, ‘mirror makes fair’/ and, ‘the best’ is God’s
will, a sudden terminal change by using a conjunction ‘But’ with the negative ‘turn’,
she expressed her strong denial of all such best qualities of the will of God. She did so
by using her angriest phrases from the continuation of the first stanza;
But what if God’s will were the famine, the flood?—
And were God’s will the coffin shut down in your fact?—
And were God’s will the worm in the fold of the bud
Instead of the picture, the light, and the lace? (85).
God’s will from, ‘the bud of rose’ – became ‘famine and flood’, ‘Ring of hand’ and
‘pearly to breast’ became, ‘coffin shut down fact’. Also, ‘the bud of rose’ turns as ‘the
worm in the fold of the bud’. With the smoothing expressions, God’s will was
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defined, later in the third stanza. Yet, Piatt described the will of God to a harder sense
as follows;
Were god’s will the arrow that flieth by night,
Were god’s will the pestilence walking by day,
The clod in the valley, the rock on the height—
I fancy ‘God’s will’ would be harder to say (88).
The realization of one’s own will power would depend on one’s own attitude.
The literally expressed feeling of keeping a child of mother exhibits the aesthetic
pleasure by sustaining;
God’s will is – your own will. What honour have you
For having your own will, awake or asleep?
Who praises the lily for keeping the dew,
When the dew is so sweet for the lily to keep?
Even the unconcern of the lily’s artistic quality of mother’s caring a child in her, as
lily bears ‘dew’ on it. It explains the emotion of happiness and un-praised beauty of
Nature. At her final phase while expressing her belief in the will of God ‘She let her
thoughts a swaying between ‘Harder” and ‘Divine”. She was helpless when shedding
‘desolate tears’ by the loss of her children. According to God's will she understood
that man was created from dust and to dust he would return when he dies. She
ironically laments that God's will is 'divine' when she would die and return to dust.
She also satirically calls that she has to subject to God's will, when she dies, she
would hear God's approval that, ‘He is well pleased.’ Her anger towards death and the
events of life makes her ask the same age old question of death;
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God’s will unto me is not music or wine,
With helpless reproaching, with desolate tears,
God’s will I resist, for God’s will is divine;
And I – shall be dust to the end of my years.
God’s will is not mine. Yet one night I shall be
Very still at his feet, where the stars may not shine,
“Lo! I am well pleased,” I shall hear from the sky;
Because – it is God’s will I do, and not mine. (89).
According to Bennett (2001), “We Two” is the one, among Piatt’s angriest poems.
“We Two” reflects her rage at having lost two children within a single year the
unnamed baby in 1893 and Victor, who died on Fourth of July accident in 1874. This
poem’s imagery draws from the Bible. Especially, it speaks about why man has to
suffer and whether God helps a man who suffers or he punishes him. It’s a beautiful
Biblical allusion with reference to Psalm 91:5.6 and Job 21:33 in Bible. Sarah
identifies her speaker of this poem with Job as much as with Christ!” (168).
This poem was published in the ‘Independent” in September 1874. Bennett
(2003 241) says that “It appeared to be a serious poem, most explicitly elegiac, in
which Piatt responded to the deaths of her children: an unnamed infant in 1873, and
her oldest son, Victor who would probably be the boy mentioned in ‘The Palace
Burner’ — in July, 1849. Through the following poems entitled, ‘A Butterfly’s
Message”, ‘The Favourite Child”, ‘Answering a Child’, ‘Comfort--by the Coffin’, and
‘Sad Wisdom – Four years Old’ she expresses the gamut of emotions which one
might expect from a woman who had lost two children within a single year and whose
religious faith is not strong enough to handle the pursuant crisis ” (2003 241).
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There are some poems which would provide glimpses to see mother-speakers
with a different and varied nature than what one would actually imagine and expect.
To be expressive of her thoughts and feelings Sarah Piatt has left some notable
remarks in her writing through the words and phrases, especially in the form of
‘Dramatic Realism’ to know the other side of the women or the mother speakers of
her poems. For example, in this poem entitled, ‘Questions of the Hour’, the chief
characteristics of Sarah Piatt are found in most of the key components of Piatt’s
emerging poetics of dramatic realism, such as, the use of words actually heard and
spoken in conversation, personal identification in experience, building the poems in
dramatic situations, says PB Bennett, (164 8). Sarah Piatt’s mother, speaker or Sarah
herself needs to fulfill the expectations of her children. That could also be seen and
justified from these poetic lines, principally expressed by her child after a careful
listening to the story of Cinderella, on bedtime;
Read Cinderella just once more----I know
What makes----men’s other wives—so mean?”
That I was tired, it may be cross, before
I shut the painted book for her to go.
Hours later, from a child’s white bed
I heard the timid, last queer question start:
“Mamma, are you---my stepmother?” it said.
The innocent reproof crept to my heart. (2001 10-11)
Would there be such a woman in the 19th century contemporary era of Sarah
Piatt, as the step-motherly acting like of Cinderella’s with evil characteristic and ill
treating nature towards the innocent soul like Cinderella’s? If not, what could have
been the reason for that child of the poem to raise a question towards her own mother?
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It could be possible. Because, unless there would be a situational and attitudinal
impact in children, such questions would not be raised if the child has spoken out
rarely with the lack of sub-consciousness’ inducement over the related situations such
as the one the child came across by listening to the story of Cinderella’s suffering out
of her step-mother’s ill treatment. On the other hand, that question could be of Sarah
Piatt’s mother-speaker for the sake of rising to accomplish and to get the attention or
the awareness of such situations. It is done with a universal thought of expectation (of
a writer) to be justified with moral approach. Meanwhile, on both the sides, Sarah
Piatt’s experience of throwing some light on such social events could merely be
acknowledged for her poetic skill in dramatizing the social realism of her living
period.
Sarah Piatt’s speakers on motherhood spare their selfless identification being
deviated from the basic qualities such as to be ‘shut up’ in homes rather to express
individual aspirations in relation to social and political aspects. Most of her poems are
means of expressing the subjectivity of the middle-class, working-class women’s
domestic and pious nature too. On the contrary, in some poems like “Angel in the
House”, Sarah has tried to break the concept of woman as an angel which has been
the belief of the 19th century.
Maturity comes from experiencing the life. The immaturity ends in childhood
age. Before the experience begins if the child dies, how a mother could feel and what
would be the wish of that mother of the dead child? This has become the subject of
discussion in “Child’s Faith”. In this poem, the mother or the speaker described the
nature of her child who died, which caused much pain to her. It was like in her genteel
style of dramatic realism, she ended up with the situational dialogue between mother
and child. “Sarah Piatt was wearily sad, due to the loss of her children by the years
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1873, 1874, and 1884” (PB Bennett xxiii). The childhood stages could also be
considered as needed to correlate for identifying whether Sarah’s son’s loss has
aroused her feelings expressed in this poem. This poem was first published in the year
1877 (Smo 14:2:247, Je 1877). Probably, this could be written about the loss of her
second male-child, whom she lost in the year 1874, prior to the publication of this
poem. The de-personalized thoughts of the mother in this poem have given the clues
to understand the speaker’s faith in the ‘divinity of life’ and ‘non-belief in death’,
which are found in these following lines:-
--- come here, I say, little child of mine,
Come with your bloom and breath
(If he should believe in the life divine,
I will not believe in death!) (SMB Piatt160)
And, through her own child’s voice she could have spoken as a conversation between
the son and herself as;
Where is your brother?”---- I question low,
And wait for his wise reply.
Does he say, “Down there in the grave?’ Ah, no;
He says, with a laugh, “In the sky! (160).
In Paula Bennett’s words, it is said that, “Piatt’s awareness of the less-than-cherubic
nature of her children is strikingly evident not just in the poems that represent them
alive, but, even more noteworthy, in the poems presenting them as dead” (2001 xlvi –
xlvii). Piatt’s voice through the mother of children seems to be very tender, playful
and funny sometimes. The tender nature of mother's love is expressed in this poem
with greater expectation that, her son should be in heaven (“In the Sky!”) rather to be
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in grave (“Down there in the grave?”). The usage of children in dialogue to express
her ‘wish’ and ‘nature of being’ are Piatt’s marveling tactics of poetic art.
Sarah Piatt’s mother speakers are having the inherent qualities of motherhood
and also the qualities of socially impacted aspects. Sarah Piatt’s speakers are socially
responsible women rather than to be only mothers of filial love. The role of mother-
speakers of Sarah has played an active part in expressing the tender love of
motherhood. The loss of Sarah’s own children has shaken her faith in religion and
godliness. The traumatic impact of losses has affected her in various ways like,
psychologically and theologically. In “Her Blindness in Grief” the mother's pain of
losing her first child has been pictured in a length of fifty four lines divided into nine
sestets. This might be impregnated with autobiographical elements of all her agony
and pain. She has a feeling as if her soul was detached in the form her child’s death.
She describes it as;
What if my soul is left to me?
Oh! Sweeter than my soul was he.
Its breast broods on a coffin lid;
Its empty eyes stare at the dust.
Tears follow tears, for treasure hid
Forevermore from moth and rust:
Also, her faith in God and Godliness has got shaken out of the unexpected loss of her
dearly loved child;
The sky a shadow; how much
I long for something I can touch!
God is silence: Could I hear
Him whisper once, “Poor child,” to me!
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God is a dream, a hope, a fear,
A vision – that the seraphs see.
The faith is shaken due to her inability to feel the tangible presence of God, whom she
could see, touch and speak physically. She could not trust in an invisible, eternal God
whom only seraphs could see and God is a dream to her. According to Bennett,
“Sarah Piatt’s loss and grief over the death of her child, J.J. Piatt, her husband, in a
letter to Stedman (August 20, 1873) described the death of Sarah’s four day-old infant
from unknown cause. It was her first such loss and she was inconsolable” (2001 168).
The feelings over the death of her child had directly affected and the outcome of it has
got projected in her writing.
She drew the allusion from the resurrection of Son of God, after his death.
According to the Bible, it’s not her mother Mary but Mary Magdalene who was
consoled by Him, “Why weepest thou?” Sarah used the allusion as if the mother was
consoled and the consoling question would be a mocking question to her.
Woman, why weepest thou?” One said,
To His own mother, from the dead.
If He should come to mock me now,
Here in my utter loneliness,
And say to me, “Why weepest thou?”
I wonder would I weep the less. (PB Bennett 49)
The final stage of grief out of her child’s loss was said in the following stanza;
Oh! But to kiss his little feet,
And say to them, “So sweet, so sweet,”
I would give up whatever pain
(What else is there to give, I say?)
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This wide world holds. Again, again,
I yearn to follow his away. (I51, 7th Sestet)
In speaking about Sarah Piatt’s maternal poetry it is indeed to recognize the quote of
Wearn Mary McCartin who says that “…. The poet’s (Sarah Piatt’s) specific
preoccupation with the maternal has not been adequately articulated, due largely to
the exigencies of recovery” (2006, 35). She also said that, “…Bennett’s (PB Bennett)
recovery strategies have now successfully positioned Piatt in the heart of nineteenth-
century poetry studies, it is time to recalibrate our evaluation of the poet and to
acknowledge that Piatt’s extensive body of work on motherhood is every bit as
challenging and political as like her poems about the Civil War” (35).
In this discussion, the poem “Her Blindness in Grief” induces to raise
questions about Sarah’s faith on God, religion and mercy of God. Because, she
resented God for taking her child away and used phrases like ‘God is a dream, a hope,
a fear / a vision—That the seraphs see’ (II sestet). In “A Child in the Park” (subtitled
as ‘St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and July, 1890)’ she had shown that feel in fourth
and fifth stanzas:
Silk tassels blew from Indian corn
Where he was born.
The Atlantic fireflies led him through
The dust and dew.
The slave’s light songs had left the South;
But that young mouth
Mocked them, till his dark muse would weep
Herself to sleep. (PB Bennett 136-137).
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PB Bennett denotes as “Sarah might have left the last impression and marking about
her musing Maid, an African lady (179).” She was living in Ireland (the country had
long lasting war with England over its own land on political and religious matter).
Sarah Piatt has realized that they would not extend their stay in that country anymore.
Rather, she indicated that the time has come for them to leave to their motherland,
Southern America from the following lines;
My child, the world is sweet; but oh,
We too must go-
We are not of it, Golden-head!
We both are dead.
And, on the other side, speaking about the morality of life from the physical world,
these poetic lines are provided as sense of Pun.
In the poem entitled ‘The Witch in the Glass’ Piatt’s speaker has played both
the roles of child and mother. The opening of this short poem comes as the child’s
opinion of explaining what her mother said to her. She wants to stand in front of the
mirror which would reflect her to have self admiration. Because, in the second stanza
as the speaker her mother has responded as something would happen in the form of a
boy who may offer her a rose as the symbol of love – which she should not go
through according to the mother.
The first stanza beautifies with imageries like ‘the mirror’, ‘the witch’ and ‘red
– red mouth’ which could be taken as not existing possibility in the physical world,
rather it would be possible in a dream and in fairy tales or in the utopian world. The
imagery ‘red red meat’ could be seen with the literal meaning of it to equate to and
correlate with the sense of expression of the mother in the second stanza in terms of
‘love’ through the ‘rose’ offered by a boy as a token of his love-proposal. The normal
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offering of it has disturbed her mother’s (speaker’s) life by the experience. Moreover,
that could be the reason why the speaker does not want her daughter to be caught by
such chance at her own conscious eyes. She reflects it in the following lines;
My mother says I must not pass
Too near that glass;
She is afraid that I will see
A little witch that looks like me,
With a red, red mouth, to whisper low
The very thing I should not know!”
A lack for your entire mother’s care!
A bird of the air,
A wistful mind, or (I suppose
Sent by some hapless boy) a rose,
With breath too sweet, will whisper low,
The very thing you should not know! (104)
The child who would reach the prime youth might be a reason of her mother’s denial
or fear to allow her child to be in front of the mirror. And mother’s aspiration’s
shadow was revealed there as, who would be that unlucky boy who could offer rose,
as symbol of love. The mother has worried that, even the rose would be offered by a
hapless boy, the rose would be sweet and its fragrance would be sweeter – which
would bring that boy’s low whispered phrases of love-proposal. She has to be
conscious not to let such incidents happen to her daughter. How long a bloomed
flower could be veiled with a shadow, and her daughter from looking in the mirror?
Rather that would be unveiled to the eyes of sun and light of it to admire. The
expected changes have happened through such a hapless boy.
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This poem reveals that how the love of a mother gets another form of
protecting her child from the eyes of any person without the knowledge and
acknowledgment of the mother. This sense of concern and consciousness shows that
accuracy of the conventional and culturally bracketed life of the middle class woman
of Victorian sense. Here, the speaker, the mother plays the role as it could have been
in most of her poems, as the preserver of nineteenth-century conventional practices of
social norms, being a mother of bourgeois, and the working-class. In relation to this
sense, Piatt, in her ‘If I Had made the world’ lets the mother speaker’s responses to
her child’s questions about what she could have done if she were God, the creator of
the world. The mother’s efforts in getting the child’s concentration to her caring
explanation were visibly complex while it is seemed like the child tries to pronounce
the word ‘Shakespeare’. The mother spelt the name ‘Shakespeare’ whom she has
wanted to create if she were God, the creator. This subject of the poem is revealed in
this child-mother conversation;
I would have made one Poet too---
Has God made more? --- Yes, I forgot,
There is no need of asking you;
You know as little as I do
A poet is ---well, who knows what?
And yet a poet is, my dear
A man who writes a book like this,
(There never was but one, I hear ;)
-----Yes, it is hard to spell S-h-a-k-e-s-p-e-a-r-e.
So, now, Good-night, --- and here’s a kiss. (PB Bennett 104)
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The conversation about child sometimes seems to leave chances to examine the
mother’s status too. And, in some places the funny questions of child would get some
philosophical responses from her mother; such as in ‘The Palace Burner’:-
Would I? Go your play. Would I, indeed?
I? Does the boy not know my soul to be!
Languid and worldly, with a dainty need
For light and music? Yet he questions me. (SMB Piatt 120)
The funny sense of questioning towards mother gets philosophical responses such as
the following:-
Oh Mother, look-We all are gone,
Our house is swimming in the sea.
It will not stop. It keeps right on.
How far away love all must be!
The wind has blown it from the Clift.
It rocks us like a skiff.
The author’s belief in matters of after death is expressed as;
We all will drown but Baby. He
Is in his pretty grave so far.
He has to sleep till judgment. We
Must sink where all the sailors are,
Who used to die, when storms would come,
Away off from their home. (SMB Piatt 5-6)
The first stanza comes as the words spoken by the child about the danger in flood that
seized their home. Out of fear of drowning in the water the child tried to get her
mother’s attention for help. In responding to that situation, the mother had revealed
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the nature as something critical through her philosophical expression in the second
stanza. The mother’s moral support was expressed in her words.
Being in such a close and loving ‘nearness’ with the children, Piatt out of
fondness, has been forced to question God. After the death of her dearly loved child,
in the poem entitled ‘No Help’, she is forced to question God and His love. If He is a
father to me, why should He allow me to go through this agony? She meditates where
her son could be, and if he is with her father in Heaven, then why she is excluded
from her father. She wishes that she would join him in death and that is the only
bridge connecting heaven and the dust of earth. She questions the very faith in the
following lines from the third stanza;
Is he not with his Father? So I trust.
Is he not His? Was he not also mine?
His mother’s empty arms yearn toward the dust.
Heaven lies too high, the soul is too divine.
I wake at night and miss him from my breast,
And – human words can never say the rest. (PB Bennett 84)
Thus, the fondness towards the children and faithfulness towards God’s will is
portrayed and the speaker is found to be deserted while the frequent deaths have
washed away her children with continual gap. That absolutely made her sways
between the Faith and fear of loss.
The following quote by Mary McCartain, would be fit to get the phrases of her
for the dealing of Motherhood in Sarah Piatt’s poems. Warren, Mary McCartain
(2006) said in her subjection and subversion in Sarah Piatt’s maternal Poetics, that
“In fact, Piatt recognized the political and cultural currency of the maternal,
finding in motherhood the significant juncture of women’s private and public lives.
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Beginning in post revolutionary America and coming to fruition in the mid-nineteenth
century, the role of the ‘Republican Mother’ as Lind K. Kerber aptly names it,
become virtually the only authentic means for American women to enact their
citizenship. Keenly aware of the de facto political nature of motherhood, Piatt uses
maternity as the fulcrum of her cultural critique. Resisting society’s conservative,
sentimental, constructions, Sarah Piatt initiates an alternative discourse of motherhood
that explores the maternal role as a potential site of both subjection and subversion”
(2006, 77).
The Voice of ‘Woman’
‘The Palace Burner’ and the ‘Beatrice Cenci’ are the poems on political
themes which reveal the themes apart from the stemming in essential qualities of
womanhood and motherhood. Sarah Piatt, being a sentimental maternal figure, who
had deeply rooted in the belief of nineteenth century American cultural de facto
(which means ‘concerning fact) and conventional aspects of religion, used (her)
children’s voice for the social events, (which were haunting the contemporary
political events and strategies). Motherhood in her poems is seen as the prominent,
women’s moral authority and cultural prestige which are significant. The ‘Double
Quatrains’ is ten in number. Each double-quatrain carries different themes. The final
one entitled ‘For Another’s sake’ carries the wonder of motherhood. No other poems
of Sarah Piatt would serve with much greatness of motherhood, than this one.
Especially, the last couple of lines in the second stanza would get an even anyone’s
heart to be empathetic towards the discomfort and the agony of the mother, who lost
her child. It also includes the grief of (the speaker) Sarah Piatt for being unavailable to
comfort that mother for her loss of child in the infancy stage itself. The feelings of
'fellow mother' are given in the following stanzas;
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“Sweet, sweet? My child, some sweeter word than sweet,
Some lovelier word than love, I want for you.
Who says the world is bitter, while your feet
Are left among the lilies and the dew?
…Ah? So some other has, this night, to fold
Such hands as his, and drop some precious head
From off her breast as full of baby-gold?
I, for her grief, will not be comforted" (SMB Piatt 121)
Being in another mother’s state of grief-haunted stage for the loss of a child,
who would have just been in the breast of her or his mother for milk, Sarah Piatt has
drawn the sympathetic over-tone for her empathetic feeling of ‘fellow-mother’ to
another woman’s child. As a loving mother, she has portrayed a gift of love in her
poems. She’s furious on the loss of her children as she loved them and deeply
cherished their love. She could not enjoy the hopeful world and she was longing and
sorrowful for a better world which could be secured for the children.
The voice of ‘wife’
It is observed in Sarah Piatt's poems that she has written poems by insisting
the significance of love after marriage. The following discussion focuses on the voice
of Sarah Piatt’s speaker as wife.
From around 1900 onwards Sarah Piatt’s family has the effect of the crucial
financial crisis. She could be able to publish only around 25 poems in magazines and
periodicals. By 1914, Sarah’s husband John James Piatt was seriously injured in a
carriage accident. Until he died in the year 1917, he never regained his competence.
Around 1900 a letter was written by Sarah to her son Guy, stating about the
inconvenience in continuing her writing: “My Name and my {pen} have gone…
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wherever the English is spoken”. Sarah Piatt had lived for her writing and gave life
for its art, until her last breathe got farewell in the year 1919 two years later to her
husband’s death.
There was some coherence to all the events narrated above with the signs she
happened to find in her life events from around 1900. One of the signs was left in the